Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CCwas a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. He was educated at the University of Manitoba and Cambridge University and began his teaching career as a Professor of English at several universities in the U.S. and Canada, before moving to the University of Toronto where he would remain for the...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1911
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.
Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.
When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.
The space of early Greek cosmology was structured by logos - resonant utterance or word.
Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.
The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.
The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati.
The most human thing about us is our technology.
In an age of multiple and massive innovations, obsolescence becomes the major obsession.
I've always been careful never to predict anything that had not already happened.
New media are new archetypes, at first disguised as degradations of older media.
The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.